Matthew Paul reviews The Hawthorn Bride by Victoria Gatehouse (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2024).
Pinecone
I write in praise of the female cone
those first tiny buds
spiral bound
on the pedestal of a spring shoot
red‐brown scales tilted back –
an invitation
for pollen grains to slip
into the stickiness of ovules.
I write in praise of woody fists
clenched against the rain
of winters fixed in resin glaze
until plates flex apart
in response to warmth
delicate seed‐wings, released
to the breeze.
I write in praise of the cone
on my desk –
raised from a needle bed
open to the possibility of wind
even after the seeds have flown.
There are some poets whose well-made poems proliferate so much in journals, among competition winners, and then in excellent pamphlets, that you wonder why they haven’t yet had a full collection. Two pamphlets – Light After Light (Valley Press, 2018) and The Mechanics of Love (SmithǀDoorstop, 2019), the latter Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Laureate’s Choice’ – had already shown what Gatehouse could do across 20-odd pages. Managing the expanse of a book-length collection is, of course, a different matter. Gatehouse has wisely chosen to include just nine poems from her two previous publications (for the poetry consumer there’s little so irritating as buying a book that includes most of the poems you’ve already bought in pamphlet form). But numerous poems by this poet have already been out in the world on their own; it’s therefore intriguing to see how she has attempted to shape into a whole the 58 poems which made the cut.
From a first reading of The Hawthorn Bride, one can see that several themes are laced through it, rather than compartmentalised. Repeated readings suggest that this was a good decision. It’s tricky deciding whether or not to lump similarly themed poems together as a sequence; one possible advantage of not doing so, is that the reader must work harder to understand the poet’s intentions. Here, the title poem comes first, as one of twenty concerning (as a helpful note tells us) types of trees and shrubs of the Ogham and (in most cases) their folklore. It’s an unrhymed, mysterious sonnet, rooted in nature and the night. In terms of how it unsettles the reader, it provides an inspired choice as the opener:
[…] Imagine
what it would be to cup her heart –
a yellowhammer in a grotto of thorns.
Savour her scent of musk and decay
a foretaste of what’s to come –
the twisted arms of a crone
to hold you through winter’s ice.
The use of the imperative here pitches the reader firmly into this sensuous scene; and the poem, like much of the book, is determinedly female (there are few males within The Hawthorn Bride, but when they feature, they do so memorably). The poem’s title is an attractive one too; other good titles in the collection include ‘Pornography for Pandas’ and ‘The Man who Grows Marigolds in Urinals’.
The poem is a fine match of form to content: the slants enables economical clauses and a quick and heady progression of time and location, taking the poem to that surprisingly lyrical conclusion
The Ogham twenty are, understandably, variable in their quality: once a poet has started writing poems on a series of subjects, there will likely be some which feel more forced than others. At their best, Gatehouse’s ‘tree’ poems are tremendous: the praise poem ‘Pinecone’, with lots of delightful internal rhyme, gives us “woody fists / clenched against the rain // of winters fixed in resin glaze”; the incantatory ‘Rowan Daughter’ chants “the uncurled rose of her heart / the light and shade of her blossoming”; and ‘Elder Mother’ has word-drunk longer lines:
On Midsummer’s Eve, her flowerings, their wine-lovely spin
& the Elf King beckoning from the haze of the otherworld.
Such poetry might easily become Tolkienesque fantasy, but Gatehouse keeps it grounded in the shadows just out of our fingertips’ ordinary reach. At times, her poems delve into Folk Horror via a dark take on fairy tales, reminiscent of the prose of Angela Carter and Sara Maitland, and the art of Joan Jonas:
I had my knives out
scoring through stories of my childhood,
those Easy Reading Ladybird books
where princes lay waste to forests
to rouse her with a delicate kiss.
I was the rod with a barb at its end,
the witch who trapped winter in her bones
(‘I Always Knew I was a Blackthorn)
As in fairy and other folk tales, the innocence of childhood (and its loss) is another of the central themes, but one which develops like a sub-plot. Occasionally, it surfaces more prominently, as in ‘Flasher, 1991’, where the appearance of the titular character is deftly recalled, ending with dark, topical humour, in addition to the seriousness it deserves:
[…] we don’t look back / the policeman
winks / as he asks did we notice what he
wore on his feet / wasn’t looking at his
feet I say & we all / piss ourselves
my friend & I lose touch / sometimes
I think of her when / skirting that bend
in the lane where laurels / hedge me in
one of the places I’ve learned to / quicken
how easy it is for rustle / to enter the breath
The poem is a fine match of form to content: the slants enables economical clauses and a quick and heady progression of time and location, taking the poem to that surprisingly lyrical conclusion. Finding the right form for poems is an underrated skill, but here and throughout the collection, Gatehouse shows she has mastered it.
In the cleverly titled ‘Reservoir Gods’, the poet’s gaze romanticises the protagonists, but bears in mind the perilous risks they take:
They pay no heed to warning signs
about deep water and toxic blooms
of blue-green algae. These are dangers
which don’t concern them
How often, in the last few years especially, have we heard reports of adolescent boys drowning in reservoirs? The poet doesn’t explicitly say that the group she’s writing about are young men, but it’s obvious from the rich details: “all swagger / in a hit of Hugo Boss”. The description continues beautifully, as if this is a Rococo Arcadian scene painted by Watteau or maybe Henry Tuke:
Their F words
lift geese as they take over the path
through ancient pines to a pebbled shore
and the afternoon cracks open, fizzes
like a shaken can, all vigour and foam
as they strip and dive in.
The poem is one of the more straightforward in its telling; it doesn’t have the camouflage of folklore. Nevertheless, it’s powerful writing and a compelling read. In a similar vein, the poet turns her focus onto her two children (to whom the book is dedicated) in a number of poems. The strangest of them, ‘My Daughter’s Hip Bones’, has a loose form which suits the dreamy non-sequiturs that Gatehouse somehow conjures out of a hospital appointment:
and I’m imagining what might exist
beneath these lights
this fraying gown
the sunken bed of her marrow sticky
with stem cells
distorted starfish reaching
for each other a mesh of light
on which her bones might grow strong
If the primary trick of poetry is to supply unexpected words to better describe the world (and beyond), then Gatehouse has cracked it.
As this poem implies, the author knows her science; she’s a zoologist, and her learning and her awareness of species depletion and habitat loss underpin many pieces here. In ‘for the Alaskan Wood Frog’, for example, repetition and rhythm deliver the feeling of an incantation: “because you suspend // hope as ice-crystals between the walls / of blood cells because you never stop // believing in beetles & birdsong the fat / glisten of peat-bog slugs”. Elsewhere, she anthropomorphises, sometimes writing in the voice of the subject, as in ‘You Can Call Me Hemlock’, where she again uses the imperative effectively and detonates memorable phrases: “Ditch the expectation of aniseed – / my odour is a stoning of mouse.”
Gatehouse’s poetry sounds mellifluous on the ear and her language is inventive, fresh and captivating
If I have a criticism, it’s only that The Hawthorn Bride feels a little over-stuffed. One or two of the tree poems – for example, ‘Aspen Grove’ with its seven short lines, and ‘When My Parents Were Apple Trees’ (which doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its alluring title) feel slight in comparison to others. But this is mere quibbling when the treasures of the collection include poems like ‘Owl Light’, an exceptionally good unrhymed sonnet which opens (and then continues) beautifully:
This is the hour she thinks of the field,
unsteady embrace of drystone walls,
feather-tipped grasses, murmuring
their untidy truths, the tooth-hole ruin
of that barn where she first found the pellets –
dark, neat parcels of feathers and fur
Gatehouse’s poetry sounds mellifluous on the ear and her language – that superb ‘tooth-hole’ – is inventive, fresh and captivating. Poetry collections that take a long time fermenting often provide the most palatable brew, and The Hawthorn Bride is a tipple in tip-top condition.
Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked as a local government education officer for many years. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and is co-writer / editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.
’Pinecone’ is from The Hawthorn Bride by Victoria Gatehouse (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2024) — thanks to Victoria Gatehouse and Indigo Dreams for letting us publish it.
